Screenshots 6 and 7 are approved, so the remaining 0.2.0 work is the traversal
release check. This adds the piece of harness it needs - `-walk` holds forward input
from the first frame, so the pawn actually crosses the sidewalk while the third-person
rig follows it - and records what that check still lacks.
A stride shot was attempted three times and removed: a fixed review camera cannot
catch a pawn moving at 4.5 m/s. Each attempt framed it at a different distance and
the last two missed it entirely, so shipping it would have been a broken shot with a
green verification. The TODO item now says the blocker is the capture harness (a
camera that tracks the pawn), not the game, and names where the shot goes back in.
The flag stays because it is what the traversal check will drive.
The character now stands naturally: arms at its sides with a soft elbow bend, hands
at the hips, feet flat. Both character shots confirm it, front and back.
The root cause was not the pose. The FBX importer had been silently refusing to
replace the existing assets: after changing the arm base from 1.55 rad to 0.55 rad
and rebuilding, the imported clip returned the IDENTICAL bone quaternion
(+0.006, +0.002, -0.179, -0.984). replace_existing=True was set and delete_asset
returned False even after chmod u+w, because the pawn's constructor hard-references
the clips. Importing under a new name (CharacterV2) created fresh assets and the
same probe then returned (+0.439, +0.898) — the rotation had landed. Every earlier
attempt had been invisible for this reason.
The rotation itself is measured, not inherited: sweeping it in Blender gives 0.55 rad
for arms down and clear of the body, 0.65 for straight down against the hip, 0.75 for
past vertical and into the torso. It lives in the clamp keys, not in the bind: every
bind experiment was impossible on this shape-keyed MPFB mesh or left Unreal showing
the old bind.
Remaining, for 0.2.2: the fingers splay from the bind, and the walk clip has still
not been captured in motion.
The character now stands with its arms at its sides instead of in a bind A-pose,
and there is a second camera to prove it: the third-person shot only ever showed
the pawn's back, so a front-facing pose defect was invisible in review.
demo-third-person-front camera on the road, ~6 m in front, looking back north
at the pawn; embedded in Screenshots/README.md as shot 7.
The pose work itself is a chain of measured findings, all recorded in TODO.md:
- clip data is exported relative to the REST pose, so arms-down offsets held only in
the keys arrived as a ±20 degree swing around an A bind;
- a rest-pose bake alone does not move the mesh: the MPFB mesh has shape keys, the
armature modifier cannot be applied while they exist, and the vertices stayed in
the A shape (X span unchanged at 1.051 m). Clearing the shape keys, baking the
deformation into the vertices and re-binding is what made bind and clips agree.
Not settled, and left as an open item rather than a claim: the base pose uses
inverted signs to compensate for the FBX axis mapping, the upper arms clip into the
torso, and the fingers splay. An aim-based pose module was written and then removed
- applied without the vertex bake it produced arms raised in a V, and a half-working
shared module is worse than none. The proper solve is 0.2.2: apply the standing pose
at character creation, then author clips against that bind.
The body stood in an A-pose while the log said the clip was playing. Two
independent defects, found by querying the imported asset instead of guessing:
1. PlayAnimation needs the component in AnimationSingleNode with a live
single-node instance. The body is hidden at construction and only unhidden by
the camera toggle, so the first call could land before the component was ready,
and the Wanted == PlayingAnimation guard then returned forever. UpdateBodyAnimation
now sets the mode, calls SetAnimation + Play, and re-asserts while the instance
is missing.
2. The arms-down offsets lived only in the clip keys. The exporter writes clip data
relative to the rest pose, so they arrived as a ±20 degree swing around an
A-posed bind - which is exactly what the pose probe measured. apply_base_pose now
bakes them into the rest pose before any clip is authored, the same trick
mpfb_character_export.py --pose idle uses. The table is applied with inverted
signs: as written, the FBX axis mapping produced arms raised in a V.
Shot 6 confirms it: the arms hang at the sides. Still open and recorded - the idle
pose reads awkwardly (arms forward, hands splayed) and the walk clip has no shot in
motion; both are marked in TODO.md and Screenshots/README.md.
Instrumentation removed; the diagnostics that remain are behind
gigline.SetupLogs.
What the first pass got wrong, and what changed:
- The mural plates were placed 0.20 m INSIDE the solid blockout volume, so they
never rendered. Nothing can be recessed into a solid we do not cut: the inset is
now faked by a proud frame with a near-flush plate, and the row reads.
- Detail sat 0.05 m off the wall, under a pixel of depth at 40 m. Trim planes now
stand 0.10-0.20 m proud, and the parapet became two tiers with deeper reveals.
- 6806's parapet started at 0.62 H and left a 4.6 m blank band; the window storey
and parapet moved up to follow the photograph.
- Security bars on the upper windows, twelve fluted fins on the corner tower.
- The trim's stucco/white/glass slots are mapped onto the demo's look materials, so
the walls sit in the same noise/texture family as the rest of the block; the
colour slots sampled from the photograph stay as authored.
- Review camera pulled back and widened to 66 deg so the east end is in frame.
- The scene audit caught duplicate RetailTrim_ actors: the demo builder's clear list
did not include the new label, so every rebuild stacked another copy.
Still open and not fixable by geometry: wall lettering. A plate at 0.10 m does not
read at 40 m, so it moves to the 0.9.0 decal route (TODO.md, Screenshots/README.md).
Models the two retail buildings beside the hero from their own photograph rather
than the generic kit: bronze cornice, mural row, lettering band, stepped Deco
parapet and rounded corner tower on 6800 Lee Drug; burgundy fascia, pilasters,
white-framed windows and banded parapet on 6806-6820. Reference analysis written
before any geometry (Art/blender/retail/ref-analysis.md), every unmeasured
proportion carried into the part report as an assumption.
6822 Budget is deferred, not guessed: no photograph of it exists and the 6.0 x 5.5 m
sliver cannot be read out of the neighbour shot.
Pipeline fixes found on the way:
- render_screenshots.sh called ./Engine/... for the capture step while every
commandlet used the absolute path; set -e killed the script at 127 *after* the
maps were rebuilt, so screenshots silently stayed a day old.
- the facade kit applies to every Frontage_*/North_* actor, so it pasted its own
language over the new modelled facades; it now skips them, and the trim stages as
RetailTrim_*.
- pure bay arithmetic moved to Tools/_common.py so it is unit-testable without
Blender (4 new tests, 82 total pass).
Known gaps recorded in Screenshots/README.md, not hidden: the parapet reads as a
blank band, murals and lettering do not resolve at review distance, the tower is a
plain cylinder, and the review camera crops the east end.
zwitschi